


Simple Together

by lindsey_grissom



Category: RED (2010)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-02-20
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:48:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,038
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lindsey_grissom/pseuds/lindsey_grissom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He looks like a dangerous choice, and she’s been trained to always run towards danger.</i>  Victoria and Ivan and some scenes from their time together.  Pre & Post film.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Simple Together

“Where is Kovac?” He asks her. He doesn’t move his head, doesn’t try to pull away from the cold steel against the base of his scull.

“Dead.” She says, voice even; bored. He nods and the gun rises and falls with the movement. Her hand is steady.

“Stalov? Fredrich?” Her coat rustles as she shrugs her shoulders and he tilts his head slightly in understanding.

Below them, two voices shout over the explosions, their words little more than static as the flames crackle and the crates buckle beneath the heat.

“Why do you not kill me?” He wonders aloud, intrigued even as he plans an escape. She is a woman, he is a trained agent; it should be easy.

She is silent for a moment until another explosion silences the voices below.

“You’re not on my list.” She says, and her accent is English, smooth. The pressure against his head disappears and when he turns she is gone.

++  
++

“You are the only person to have caught me unawares.” He says when they next meet. He takes a seat across from her, his back to the bar. He doesn’t seem surprised when the waiter delivers him a drink almost as soon as he is seated, after locking eyes with him in the square he had expected her to know he would find her. He takes a sip and raises a single eyebrow at her; what he hadn’t expected was for her to know his preferred drink.

She curls a lip at him and takes a sip of her white wine. He wears a tailored tux, the lapels finished with black silk and she is draped in a blood red gown. They look the picture of sophistication. Beneath the table, she has guns strapped to her thighs, a knife against her back. His guns are across his chest, she thinks, one in his boot.

She has no job for the night, her target unaware and satisfactorily unprepared for what awaits him. Across the room a greying man sits at the baby grand and strikes a few notes. The room quiets. She listens for a few minutes, her eyes on the sway of people gradually filling the spaces between the tables.

When she turns back to him, she is surprised to find his eyes on her.

“Do you dance?” He asks, voice low.

“I’m English.” She says in answer and places her hand in his when he offers it.

His body is hard and soft in all the right places and as much as she holds back, tries to keep some distance between them, when he places a hand at the curve of her spine and raises their joined hands to his chest, she finds herself drifting closer and rests a hand on his shoulder.

He leads her in small circles, never straying far from their table. When his fingers brush against the base of her knife she tenses, just a little, but he squeezes her hand and moves her into a dip.

With her back bent and her eyes raised to the ceiling, she realises that she has relaxed in his hold, completely. Oh, she knows the positions of everyone in the room, knows how many steps it is to each exit and how many bodies could end up blocking her way. She knows that right now she could twist just enough to reach any of the weapons at her disposal, including his and lay every person in the room out before they realised who was shooting.

He brings her back up straight and smiles at her as though he knows where her thoughts have fallen.

“Thirty-six.” He says into her ear; the number of people in the room. She smiles, turning her head and hiding the expression against the skin of his neck. He has his back to the entrance, she has hers to the kitchens. “Ivan.” He announces himself, spinning her out.

“Victoria.” She replies when he pulls her back in. He smells of rich vodka and expensive cigars. He looks like a dangerous choice, and she’s been trained to always run towards danger.

The next morning she slips out from the sheets, her movements slow and measured, her body naked. He has only been asleep a few hours, she hasn’t slept at all.

The fabric of her dress whispers as she slides back inside of it. When she turns back at the door, she has the straps of her holders in one hand, her heels in the other. She watches the steady movements of his chest and finds a smile growing on her lips.

Dangerous, she thinks, the door catching softly behind her. She pushes him out of her head, focusing her mind on her target, on the next few hours.

She lines him up beneath the crosshairs, counts down from five in her head and presses the trigger at one. She feels the ghost of a finger sliding down the line of her back and gasps, lowering the gun and turning from the body she has left in the apartment across the street.

As she disappears into the crowds she reconsiders; he is perhaps more dangerous to her than she thought.

++  
++

“We must stop meeting like this.” He says when he feels the press of her gun into his back.

“We must stop meeting.” She says, her tone final. “You shouldn’t be here Ivan.”

“This I know.” He turns to face her, grateful that she lets him. Her gun rests against his hip.

“You have four minutes, five at most, before the American’s blow this place apart.” She pauses, takes a step back and turns her head to the side as though listening to something. “Make sure you’re out in three.” She looks at him one last time and then points away from her. He’s through the door in less than three steps and he doesn’t bother looking back, he knows she will already be gone.

As he runs through the corridors he hears the rapid fire and single shots of machine guns against handguns. He grins, knowing which she had been holding and makes a break for daylight up ahead.

“Now boys, is this any way to treat a friend?” He hears her voice when the guns stop firing and even though he is far from safe, he very nearly laughs.

++  
++

He strokes a hand up her side, thigh to breast and she shudders beneath him, heart pounding and chest heaving. With him, she feels like the heroine in a bad romance novel.

She reaches up, hands gripping his shoulders and drags her body up from the bed, pressing herself against him. His breath catches in her ear. Still pressed against him, her muscles straining, she touches her lips to his jaw, running her teeth lightly across the skin, nibbling at the corners of his mouth. “Breathe.” She says when she reaches his ear, and bites down on the lobe.

He crumples, and she laughs as they both hit the mattress, the sound cutting off when his weight falls on top of her.

“Bunny.” He groans, the word Russian and hoarse, spoken against her collarbone. She gasps at the tickle and wraps a leg around his hips, an arm around his back and pushes, flipping them over.

He blinks up at her, mouth dropping open a little. She drops her head, catching his lips and slipping her tongue in before he regains himself. He tastes like bad coffee and sex and her heart pounds in her chest.

He lifts his hips and she can feel him, hot and ready between her legs.

She kisses him as she lowers herself onto him. Kisses him while she raises her hips and plunges back down, over and over. Turns her face to the side and drags in air through her nose and keeps on kissing him. The angle keeps them both going until, eventually, she pulls back from his lips and sits up, arching her back, her thighs working harder without the support of her arms.

Her blood boils in her veins, her head falls back and she whispers his name again and again as she comes, her body tightening around him until he cries out her name once and grips her hips tight, his lower body jerking off the bed.

She curls against his side, still catching her breath and splays a hand above his heart, feeling the rapid thumping with a smile. He shuffles, pulling up the sheets with one hand, the other resting against her hip and drops a kiss to the top of her head.

She only says “I love you” when she’s sure he’s asleep.

++  
++

“Bunny.” He calls out when he sees her.

“Ivan, I swear, if you call me that one more time I _will_ kill you.” She turns to him and she is so beautiful when she’s angry. She looks around, but the bridge is empty for the moment, rain falling in sheets against the stone.

He doesn’t approach her and she turns away from him. They know what they can and can’t risk.

“I love you too.” He says, finishing the words she started months before.

She shows no reaction as she climbs onto the ledge and jumps. He imagines her smiling as she lands on the empty open-top bus.

++  
++

For the first time, the gun feels heavy in her hand; a burden and not a flawless extension of herself. Sitting cross legged at the bottom of the bed, she feels its weight double each time her eyes flick to him.

He has always let himself sleep when they’re together. She doesn’t know if this is how he is with everyone, but she doubts he would still be alive if it were.

This is the last time she’ll see him like this; his soft snores rumbling from him, his body spread out like an offering. She chokes and squeezes the handle of her gun until the patterns cut into her palm.

She has debated with herself about how to do this. She made the decision before the orders came, the possibility of them there the moment she let herself fall in love. It doesn’t matter that MI6 got there first. She knows it’s only a matter of time before he is ordered to do the same.

They have been so careful, but she has always known that the only way to be careful enough is to never care at all.

Her eyes caress his face. He knows that too.

She takes a deep breath, inhaling the scent of the room, of _them_ and rises from the bed.

Her bag is packed and by the door. She slips the gun into one of the pockets. She doesn’t look at him as she leaves. Doesn’t kiss him one final time or brush her fingers across his cheek.

She closes the door silently and leaves the hotel through the staff entrance. On the pile of his clothes is a note. It says ‘goodbye’.

Two hours later, she hangs up the phone and steps out of the office. It’s still early and as she walks to the window across the corridor, the floor is empty. She watches his silhouette through the crosshairs, sees him bend, right himself and pause, a hand in front of his face.

She is doing this for him she thinks, steadying her feet as he crosses the room to the curtains. So he doesn’t have to make the choice.

The curtains part and sirens move in on the street; she fires: one. two. three.

He falls before she can see blood rise and stain his chest, but she is the best shot there is and she never misses her mark.

She leaves amidst the confusion the arriving ambulance brings. In that hotel room, she would have killed him.

++  
++

He helps her remove the dress, before screwing it into a ball and throwing it to the corner of the limousine. She shudders and twists when he presses a cloth to the wound, the material turning red as it soaks up her blood. The driver-side door opens and Marvin slips into the front seat. He doesn’t turn back to them, only buckles in and starts the engine.

They’re only a block away when she reaches up to him and cups his cheek. “You need stitches.” He says, turning his face and kissing her palm.

“Do it.” She replies, her free hand reaching up and grasping hold of the handle above the door. He nods, pulling back and her hand falls from his face. She grips the back of the seat.

Marvin spins the car around a corner and his finger slips against the needle he’s threading. He catches the American’s eyes in the mirror and glares a warning.

He turns back to her and runs his eyes up her body. She is painted in scars, now, where before there were only one or two.

“Now is not the time, Ivan.” She grinds out between her teeth. She is still so beautiful when she is annoyed with him.

“You are beautiful.” He says and smooths alcohol on her wounds, when he turns her to wipe across her exit wound, she lets out a groan as she switches her hands over. Her fingernails slice into the leather.

“Ivan!” He bows his head against her pain and when he’s sure the wound is as clean as he can make it in the back of a moving vehicle, he touches the needle to her skin and starts to sew her up.

It only takes him a few minutes and she doesn’t once scream or cry out. She bites through her lip at one point, and the fresh blood slips down her chin.

When he’s done, he wraps bandages tightly around her and presses kisses against the pristine fabric.

Eventually, she laughs and reaches out for the painkillers he offers. She swallows them dry and slowly moves herself upright. She looks down at the bandages.

“Not bad.” She says and holds out her hand. He wraps it in his own, bending his body until he is wrapped around her. She taught him to heal her, the last time was much worse.

He brushes his lips against the scar on her shoulder blade.

She rests against him and Marvin reaches to the passenger seat and hands back her coat. He drapes it over her as they head towards the drop-off point. There’s a change of clothes for her in the boot of the car, but right now she needs the rest more.

“Ivan.” She whispers, turning her head into his chest. She keeps her eyes open, even in pain he knows she is keeping watch, waiting for the next problem to arise.

He smiles and holds her close.

++  
++

“What now?” She asks after they’ve dropped Francis and Sarah off at a hotel room and put Marvin in one on the other side of town.

“Now, we get you some proper treatment.” He says, taking his eyes off the road for a moment and peering at her closely.

“I’m fine.” She brushes off his concern. She had a chance, between the gun fights and what she’s going to refer to as the ‘big reveal’, to check on her wounds. There’s nothing that some strong painkillers and time won’t heal. She has all she’ll need back at the house.

He frowns at the front window, not entirely believing her. She sighs and squeezes his hand tightly.

“I will need to brief them on the favour.” He says when he relaxes again.

“That’s tomorrow.” She stares out of the window, the morning traffic rushing by. She never thought to ask him where they were going; Chicago is too far from her house to make the trip back later to see Frank and Marvin. “Where are we going now, Ivan?”

“You’ll see.” He says, his tone light but backed by enough that she thinks they aren’t just talking about a place to stay for the night anymore.

They pull up in front of a townhouse thirty-minutes later. There’s a flower climbing up the wall by the door. It’s too late in the year for it to bloom, but she can see the lines it’s left behind from the Summer.

He opens the car door for her and takes her hand to help her out. She winces, momentarily wishing they were at her house with her supplies, before he leans down and presses a soft kiss on the skin beneath her ear.

“My English Rose.” He says, staring at the marks on the wall as he unlocks the door and she blushes.

The house is well kept but un-lived in; there’s no dust to be seen on the surfaces in the hallway, but it smells empty.

“This way.” He takes her coat and directs her to a room filled with couches and cushions, comfortable to simply look at and leads her to a sprawling sofa in front of the fireplace.

She sits while he lights the fire, sinking into the cushions and letting her body relax now that everything is over. She wonders if it is a new thing; not considering Ivan something to tense up for, or if this was all a part of falling for him so long ago. She suspects it’s the latter.

She has questions, lots of them and she knows he must have too.

“Rest.” He says, settling beside her, far closer than the width of the couch requires.

“Ivan.” She says, turning to him. He places a finger against her lips.

“We have forever for questions. Tonight, you rest.” He removes his finger and replaces it with his lips, softly, tenderness more than passion. She shivers.

“Come.” He moves them until she has her back to his chest, one of his arms wrapped loosely across her stomach, the other holding her hand. She rests her head above his heart.

“Ivan.” She says again, one last attempt for control. Her eyes droop even as she fights. “Tomorrow.” She isn’t entirely sure what she means by that; a plan or a promise.

His breaths even out beneath her, the fire crackles in the grate and slowly, for the first time, she falls asleep with his arms around her.

 

 **  
_End._   
**


End file.
